It may be ironic that this bird, a symbol of peace, has been so widely utilized in war. But there is another side of the story that captures my imagination, one I haven’t seen in print but that perhaps exists in a letter, or a diary, or the personal remembrances of an aging trooper. I am convinced that one of the reasons pigeons are little liked is that so few people have spent much time with them. Pigeons may not be the smartest (by human measure) or the most loved bird in the city, but as individuals, they are sweet-tempered and easy to tame (most wild birds need to be raised from chicks to become tame, but even adult wild pigeons will come to enjoy the presence of a favorite human). Once accustomed to you, pigeons love to walk up your arm and burrow into the crook of your elbow or against your neck. They coo. They are both calm and calming. When I first learned some years ago about the pigeon corps, I immediately wondered about these men—so terribly young, homesick, and frightened—who cared for the pigeons, some responsible for a single bird, holding her close for hours a day and even into the night. What a comfort this must have been, this secret, warm being whom you could whisper to and nestle with and who would whisper and nestle back.
Can we do both of these things? Can we hold both mind-sets? Can we decry the presence of these birds, work creatively and mindfully to decrease them, and at the same time be reminded that there is a shared source of presence? That humans brought them here and continue to create the conditions under which they flourish? That we can seek their eradication or reduction and still, on a daily basis, appreciate their birdness, their feathers, flight, ingenuity, and varied intelligences?
We often talk as if the elimination of house sparrows or starlings would mean a neighborhood full of varied and glorious woodland birds, as if such a magical substitution were a possibility. I wish it were. But these birds aren’t here because they have chased away everything else; they are here because we have chased away everything else, because there are so few other species capable of living on little besides concrete and car exhaust and bread crumbs. And so here is a bird at my feet at the bus stop. While most of the birds here this morning look fat and handsome, this little pigeon hen is rumpled and lean. Her feet, though, are bright coral red, her eyes light and alert. She walks, and picks, and makes her way. I feel sympathy, empathy really, us two girls here on the damp sidewalk. And if I look at her from a certain angle, I see her, simply, as she is—a lovely bird, sacred in the round of life we share.
Chickadee
Tiny Truth
Many times I have witnessed birds eating other animals, both in the remote wilderness and the urban wilderness—everything from ravens on the body of a wild elk in the high Olympic mountains to a crow with a bloody rat in the backyard. Generally, we modern humans summon the expansiveness to accept such moments as part of an essential circle of life, even when they do involve rats. I’ve observed only one instance of an avian predator and its prey that made me actually squeamish. One day when I was a graduate student in Colorado, I went for a solitary hike in the foothills of the Rockies, passing birds I rarely see in my Seattle life (Clark’s nutcrackers, Townsend’s solitaires, indigo buntings). Turning a corner on the switchback, I startled a Cooper’s hawk on the trailside clutching a mostly dead Townsend’s solitaire beneath its yellow feet. This was a juvenile Cooper’s, and making it through the first year of life with enough to eat is never a given for this scrappy species. I love solitaires and took a moment to honor this one’s good life but quietly whispered to the hawk, “Good for you.” The Cooper’s would normally have flown at such an intrusive human presence. But hungry and young, this bird held its ground, and I walked quietly onward, bothering it as little as I could. This was not the squeamish moment—that came around the next bend in the trail where I met, on a low branch just at eye level and only a few feet from my face, a black-capped chickadee with the largest, most fat and fleshy caterpillar I have ever seen. It was a luna moth larva, as big as the chickadee and surely outweighing her by at least ten times. The larva, though its belly had been torn open by the chickadee’s tiny but very pointed bill, was still alive and squirming. Its insides, a nondescript yellow, were oozing out. And the chickadee’s delicate bill was covered with what I can only think to call caterpillar goo.
The sight of the tiny chickadee disemboweling the enormous luna moth larva turned my stomach. I emitted an involuntary eeew sound and turned away, then forced myself to regroup and look again. I learned something about chickadee foraging behavior that day, to be sure, but the larger question for me became: Why do I find this so gruesome? I have seen an owl with bloody rodent entrails hanging over its bill and the disemboweled animal under its feathered feet, and my only thought was What a gorgeous bird! Was my problem here that the larva was just too unnervingly fleshy for a creature with no skeleton? (It was.) But being honest with myself, I had to admit that there was something about the larva eater being a chickadee that was equally unsettling. Might it have something to do with black-capped chickadees being so darn cute? And if a bird is cute, do I also want to suppose it to be transcendently benevolent? Or at least nice? We see chickadees at our feeders eating sunflower seeds. Isn’t that what they ought to be doing, not murderously patrolling the forests seeking to disembowel their fellow creatures?
The chickadee is the representative garden songbird in this Urban Bestiary. A common denizen of kitchen calendars and greeting cards, the chickadee is perhaps the best-known, most popular, well-loved backyard bird in the country;* it is also among the most oversimplified. The problem for the chickadee is that its perceived cuteness is largely unmediated. There is no overlay of human vilification as there is with, say, the raccoon (just as appealingly masked, but with a marauding reputation) to temper our perceptions. There is no gray area in which our human compassion leads us into conflict, such as when we see a sharp-shinned hawk take a favorite small backyard bird (a chickadee, perhaps). The hawk is elegant and bold, its actions thrilling and essential, but, we might think in our less scientific moments, not particularly nice. And we all know that if we had to label them, chickadees would be nice. Chickadee cuteness is a given, almost a scientifically objective truth. But the chickadee remains tenaciously wild and irreducible; seeing the bird beyond its seemingly undemanding cuteness is as necessary as it is difficult.
And it is difficult. Chickadees have fat, round bodies, charming masks, bright round eyes, and they appear to exist in a constant state of busy good cheer. We see them in the morning, and our spirits lift: there are chickadees among us, and the day is a good one. Early naturalists, no matter how learned, heaped unembarrassed, sentimental prose upon the bird. In her still-indispensable Handbook of Nature Study, Anna Botsford Comstock wrote of the chickadee in 1911: It is “the most fascinating little ball of feathers ever created, constantly overflowing with cheerful song… that happy song ‘chick-a-dee-dee-dee’ finds its way to the dullest consciousness and the most callous heart.” And my beloved William Leon Dawson, a respected businessman, woodsman, ornithologist, and hunter, rhapsodized ad nauseam about these common birds and their antics. He was especially charmed by their arboreal acrobatics, which are enhanced by specialized leg muscles that make chickadees fearless in the trees: “Chickadee refuses to look down for long upon the world; or, indeed, to look at any one thing from any one direction for more than two consecutive twelfths of a second. ‘Any old side up without care,’ is the label he bears; and so with anything he meets, be it a pine-cone, an alder catkin, or a bug-bearing branchlet; topside, bottomside, inside, outside, all is right side to the nimble Chickadee.”
The Enormousness of Hummingbirds
Hummingbirds were made from the pile of feathers and fluff left over after all the other birds were created. The Mayan Great God gathered the bits together and fashioned them into a tiny bird—there wasn’t enough to make anything more. The little bird flitted and hummed joyfully about the Great God’s head, and he was so overcome with delight that he made a present for the hummingbird—a female hummingbird. Preparat
ions for the wedding were merry, as all the creatures loved the hummingbirds. Only one thing dampened the happy mood—the hummingbirds were wonderful, but being made of leftovers, they were drab. Depressingly gray. In the wedding spirit, the beings came together to make the day more festive. Spiders spread their iridescent webs on the ground to create a bridal path, and flowers dropped their petals in a circle where the small couple would exchange vows. Butterflies surrounded them in a wall of glowing wings. All the beings searched for tiny colored feathers, which they pressed onto the birds’ heads. Most wonderful of all, the sun sent special rays of red and green to fill the butterfly-room. When the male turned toward these rays, everyone gasped. His throat glowed.
The play of natural selection upon the organisms of earth is always an experiment. A wild testing of limits. What can the bauplan of a bird accomplish? Evolution is expansive, seeking, reaching into possibility but limited by physics. How big can you get and still fly? Mute swan. How small can you get and still metabolize energy quickly enough to be a bird? Hummingbird.
Hummingbirds weigh, almost literally, nothing—between 0.1 and 0.3 ounces. Their tininess appears absolute—shimmering small face, almost invisible feet. Jewels, we call them. Hummingbirds are Western Hemisphere birds, so they are absent in both the field guides and the mythologies of Europe (where their place is taken by faeries) and Africa. The modern urban hummingbird suffers a fate similar to the chickadee’s—it is its surface, its diminutive beauty, that is most eagerly admired. But in North and South America, they are woven brightly into the cross-cultural mythology, where the hummingbird’s size is measured by the strength of its spirit. In Mojave stories, the hummingbird is sent to the upper limits of the sky to seek sunlight for the people who live in an underground darkness. For the Hopi and Zuni, the hummingbird flies heavenward and intervenes for the humans, convincing the gods to send rain. Just last week, I saw a hummingbird dive-bombing a Cooper’s hawk in flight. I have seen them vocally scold raccoons. We have a rufous hummingbird in our freezer, and when we look at his tiny feet under the microscope? They look like they belong to a dinosaur.
But all close observers, no matter how charmed, eventually recognize the dogged tenacity I witnessed in the chickadee with her luna larva. In 1902, American naturalist Ernest Ingersoll wrote of the chickadee, “He is the hero of the woods,” possessing the “Spartan virtue of an eagle” and “an added pertness and ingenuity all his own. His curiosity is immense, his audacity equal to it.” Though they prefer nest cavities that occur naturally or that have been created by small woodpeckers, chickadees are capable of using their tiny beaks to excavate their own nest holes. I observed the process from start to finish once, and after the first couple of hours I felt a terrible pain in my neck. I realized it was not from sitting still, but from visceral sympathy for the birds and their astonishing exertions, seemingly out of all musculoskeletal proportion. (The next part of the process is daintier—the nest will be filled with all manner of soft things, mosses, and rabbit hair, and bits of lichen and spiderweb. The female will cover the eggs with blankets of this fluff whenever she must leave them, then she’ll return and sit on top of it all, an avian Princess and the Pea.)
Caterpillars are a favorite food in season, even some of the hairy ones, such as gypsy moths in their early instars. Chickadees eat a miscellany of insects and spiders (as well as their eggs and pupae), small slugs and snails, centipedes, soft fruits, and berries. There are many field reports of chickadees eating the eggs of other small birds and also nibbling the fat from the bones of dead vertebrates, including deer, skunk, and fish. This is a varied diet for a small bird, and it calls for persistent physical rigor.
Chickadees are well known for their vocalizations, and even nonbirders recognize their onomatopoetic-namesake call, chickadee-dee-dee, a buzzy vocalization made in all manner of circumstances and throughout the year. The male’s breeding-season song may be the most familiar of all spring songs to nonbirders—the two-note, high-low dee-dee. I’ll never forget the day my own namesake, Grandma Lyanda, called to tell me that a bird was crying outside her window. She needed to find it and help it. It was lost, lonely, or hurt. My grandmother is prone to crabbiness, and when I told her after listening to her good imitation that I was sure the bird was a chickadee singing, she indignantly put me in my place. “Lyanda, this bird is cryyyyyin’!”
Most of us know these two chickadee vocalizations, as well as the almost constant seet-seet-seet contact call they make as they go about their day foraging for food, feeder-hopping, hanging upside down and every which way in the tree limbs. But human researchers have recognized at least sixteen different vocalizations that chickadees use in both intra- and interspecific communication. These include a squealing distress call, an antagonistic snarl, rare confrontational twitters and growls used only when bickering with other chickadees, and a loud hiss coupled with a snapping of wings to create a “snake display” that frightens adversaries. In addition to all these calls and others described by ornithologists, chickadee language continues on an aural plane beyond human perception. Their signaling repertoire is one of the most sophisticated known, not just among birds, but in all the animal world. All this complexity in a bird that we see and hear near daily. A bird that, if you held it in your hand, would seem to weigh nothing at all.
The Essential Art of Pishing
The buzzy chickadee-dee call imitated even passably can convoke a whole passel of chickadees for close observation. William Leon Dawson calls it “the quickest summons in the bird-world,” the “open sesame to all woodland secrets.” Try it if you find yourself in the company of chickadees—a little dee-dee-ing, or some pishing. Pishing is a singular technique in the birder’s arsenal—the art of making a certain kind of noise to attract birds. To become a pisher, try making a raspy, whispery sort of pish-pish-pish sound. Your lips will move, and the air will pass through your teeth. The pishing should not be overloud—you are basically saying to the bird, as you would say to a person, Psst… over here! There is no one right way to do this—the pisher’s art is unique to the individual. Practice, and see what works for you. Another method is to make a moist squeaking sound by kissing the back of your hand while producing a soft smack, as a child might when kissing you on the cheek. (Kissing another person works too.)
Some think pishing is effective because it imitates the sound of a bird in distress, and the other birds want to see what’s going on. Some think the birds want to know why there is a human standing under their tree making odd sounds. I believe that for most species, it is a general curiosity. Not all birds respond to pishing, and in fact it will inspire some species to withdraw into an unmoving silence. But chickadees are mad for pishing, as are kinglets, white-crowned and white-throated sparrows, hummingbirds, and many others. It’s worth experimenting with your technique and with various birds in differing habitats. When it works, pishing is miraculous—a seemingly barren tree with birds out of sight in the highest branches can suddenly be filled with curious fluttering. Chickadees are likely to gather just overhead, and when they do, the feeling of communion—to speak the language of birds!—brings a sense of rare magic and easy joy.
During breeding season, chickadees are paired off on territories, but for much of the rest of the year, they join in groups, forming the nucleus of mixed-species foraging flocks. In these flocks, chickadees appear to be the leaders—when they fly off to a new foraging area, the other birds in the group, usually kinglets, nuthatches, small woodpeckers, sometimes sparrows and finches, follow along. Benefits for the chickadee followers include the chickadee’s bold response to predators. It gives a loud call—a version of the seet or the chickadee-dee-dee call that alerts other birds to the presence of the threat. If the perceived threat is a perched bird—a small hawk or owl—the chickadees may also lead a mob on the bird. Other species will join in the physical mobbing or maybe just sit nearby scolding in their own voices. On the surface, it might seem foolish for such vulnerable birds to throw th
emselves at a dangerous raptor, but it makes good evolutionary sense: a mobbed predator becomes confused, loses the advantage of surprise in its attack, and might be pestered into flying away (though sometimes it just hunches there on its branch, looking beleaguered). Recent research has revealed an astonishing depth to the chickadee’s alarm calls, which use a recombinant note system to encode specific information about the predator, including the kind of animal that it is, its size and location, and the perceived level of peril. For overhead predators, such as a hawk in flight, a series of seet alarm calls are given. For a perched predator, say an owl on a low branch, a wide-spectrum version of the chickadee-dee-dee call is sounded, with many more dees added at the end—five, ten, sometimes more than twenty, depending on the immediacy of the threat. Size of the predator is a major factor in the chickadee’s threat perception. A huge great horned owl might seem an ominous presence to us, but to a chickadee, the small pygmy owl is the larger menace, being agile enough to catch a nimble chickadee in flight, which bigger birds usually are not. But the chickadee perceptive capacity has to do with more than size. Other than giving a quick glance, it will not react at all to the presence of, for example, a bobwhite quail—a pygmy owl–size bird that eats seeds rather than chickadees—which means that chickadees can actually identify some birds to species, or at least general kind. Other small birds listen to the information encoded in the chickadee alert and respond accordingly, suggesting that the language of chickadees is understood by other avian species. Birds will gather and often join in mobbing and scolding an owl after a perched-small-owl alert but not for a large-owl-overhead report. This recognition of chickadee language is very recent in human ornithological understanding. In trans-species research, we are hindered by our sense of how communication should and does take place—it should be rather like our own, we think. In scientific research and in everyday watching, there is room for expansion of both whimsy and wisdom.
The Urban Bestiary Page 18